Although remembered mostly for her audacious bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was a unique literary artist of the twentieth century who left a voluminous body of work, including novels, essays, poetry, and prose. Stymied--just once--by a case of writer's block, Stein forayed into the world of mystery fiction to rediscover her path to creativity. Combining elements of free association and interior monologue that earned her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, Stein drew from a summer's worth of mysterious events at her French country home for inspiration. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is the brilliant result. A possible murder disrupts the peaceful setting when, in a nearby village, Madame Pernollet is found on the cement courtyard of her husband's hotel. Did she fall from a window above . . . or was she pushed? Was there someone who wanted the preoccupied woman out of the way? In a departure from the typical whodunit, with nary a detective to lead the way, Stein lays out a series of crimes and clues, enticing readers to come up with their own verdict on the baffling events of one unnatural summer.

Written in 1932 at the house that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had rented in the Rhone Valley, Stanzas in Meditation is one of Stein's most abstract and complex works. It is almost as if Stanzas was conceived as a mirror opposite of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, penned in the same year. The latter, written in a more direct and normative language, brought Stein international acclaim and resulted in the attention she received from 1934 on, while the former remained unavailable until its publication, after her death, in 1956. To Stein readers and admirers, however, this is one of her most important works, a poetic achievement central to her canon. From John Ashbery's groundbreaking essay-review of Stanzas in 1957 to Richard Bridgman's 1970 publication, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, poets and critics have recognized the importance of this masterpiece.

Book by Gertrude Stein